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MOCA Pacific Design Center and the Question Everyone Asks About it

MOCA Pacific Design Center and the Question Everyone Asks About it

Google the name, and you will find lots of listings with a strikethrough. Let me save you the trip right now. The MOCA Pacific Design Center closed its doors permanently on 24 February 2019, after eighteen years of operating as MOCA's West Hollywood satellite. It is...

Skirball Cultural Center and the Ark that People Visit For

Skirball Cultural Center and the Ark that People Visit For

If you were to ask a random ten families from this area why they traveled up to the Sepulveda Pass, nine out of those ten would give you the same answer. Noah's Ark. Skirball Cultural Center has a permanent children's exhibition which is so impressive that it has...

Three Uses of the Hammer Museum Los Angeles

Three Uses of the Hammer Museum Los Angeles

Most tour guides assume that a museum is one place and one activity you do once. That does not apply to this one. The Hammer Museum Los Angeles has three completely distinct uses and each of the locals who love it is likely to use it for another purpose. First, the...

Craft Contemporary LA and the Case for Culture You Do With Your Hands

Craft Contemporary LA and the Case for Culture You Do With Your Hands

There is a whole category of Los Angeles culture built for looking. Paintings behind glass. Sculptures behind ropes. And then there is Craft Contemporary LA, the small museum on Wilshire that has spent decades arguing the opposite case - that art made from clay,...

David Kordansky Gallery and the Very LA Story of How It Got Here

David Kordansky Gallery and the Very LA Story of How It Got Here

Some galleries arrive in Los Angeles fully formed, branches of empires headquartered elsewhere. This one grew here. David Kordansky Gallery started in 2003 in a scrappy corner of Chinatown, when that neighborhood was the city's incubator for young art spaces, and it...

La Cienega Park and the Art of a Full Family Day in Los Angeles

La Cienega Park and the Art of a Full Family Day in Los Angeles

Every neighborhood has one park that quietly does all the work. On the Beverly Hills side of town, that park is La Cienega Park. Not the biggest green space in Los Angeles, not the most famous, but ask the families within a two-mile radius where the kids learned to...

Marciano Art Foundation and the Question Everyone Still Asks About It

Marciano Art Foundation and the Question Everyone Still Asks About It

Type the name into a search bar and the suggestions tell the story before any article can. Is it open. What happened. Can you visit. The Marciano Art Foundation was, for a brief and genuinely exciting stretch, one of the most talked-about free art spaces in the city -...

Saban Theatre Nights and How to Do Them Properly in Los Angeles

Saban Theatre Nights and How to Do Them Properly in Los Angeles

You know a venue is special when people describe the building before they mention the show. That happens constantly with the Saban Theatre. Ask someone about a concert they caught there and they will start with the dome, the gilded ceiling, the way the place glows on...

World Cup Events in Los Angeles and How to Make the Most of the Summer

World Cup Events in Los Angeles and How to Make the Most of the Summer

Something big is coming to this city, and you can already feel people planning around it. The world cup events rolling into Los Angeles will turn an ordinary summer into the loudest, most crowded, most flag-covered stretch the city has seen in years. Matches, yes -...